Maradi, Zinder & the Centre-South

The centre-south is Hausa country, the northern fringe of the old Hausa city-states whose heartland lies in today's Nigeria. The Gobir people held the north of it, and in the 18th century the Kanuri-speaking Sultanate of Damagaram, a vassal of the Bornu Empire, rose around Zinder. Zinder became its capital and grew rich on the trans-Saharan caravan trade, dealing in salt, leather, ostrich feathers and enslaved people, with a caravan quarter, Zengou, outside the walls of the royal Birni.

The Fula-led jihad of Usman dan Fodio from 1804 reshaped the region. The Hausa rulers of Katsina, driven from their city, retreated north and founded a new kingdom at Maradi, a rival of the Sokoto Caliphate.

French expeditions reached the area at the end of the 19th century; the explorer Marius Gabriel Cazemajou was killed in Zinder in 1898, and French troops took the town in 1899. Zinder was the colony's capital until 1926, when the seat of government moved to Niamey. In the colonial and early independence decades groundnuts, grown for export, made Maradi the country's commercial hub. The Tahoua region was the starting point of the first Tuareg rebellion of the 1990s, after clashes at Tchintabaraden in 1990.

Hausa is the language of the region and of its markets, spoken by the great majority; Kanuri is heard around Zinder, Tuareg and Fula herders live in the north of all three regions, and Wodaabe camps move through the pastures. Islam is the faith of almost everyone, with strong Sufi brotherhoods, and older Hausa spirit-possession practice, bori, survives on the margins.

Traditional rulers matter. The sultan of Zinder and the chief of Maradi, whose lineage goes back to the kings of Katsina, hold court in their palaces, judge disputes and appear at the two great Islamic festivals with horsemen in embroidered robes and quilted armour, musicians with long trumpets and drums, and praise-singers.

Hausa craftsmanship is famous: leatherwork and dyed goatskin, embroidered robes and caps, pottery, blacksmithing, and the moulded and painted facades of banco houses, most striking in Zinder's old town. Wrestling is hugely popular, and the region's champions are national celebrities. Trade shapes the culture too: Maradi's big merchants built fortunes on commerce with Kano and Katsina, and family and religious networks run across the border.

This is the most densely populated part of Niger. Maradi and Zinder are the country's second and third cities, each with several hundred thousand people; Tahoua, Birni-N'Konni, Tessaoua, Magaria and Madaoua are important market towns, and most people live in farming villages.

Farmers grow millet, sorghum, cowpeas and groundnuts on rain-fed fields and vegetables in irrigated plots, most famously the onions of Galmi. The oil refinery at Zinder processes crude from the Agadem fields in the east, and much of the region's income comes from trade with Nigeria, legal and informal, in grain, livestock, fuel and manufactured goods. Weekly markets rotate between towns and villages, drawing traders by bus, donkey cart and camel.

Pressures are heavy. The population grows fast, farms are split between sons into ever smaller plots, droughts and floods alternate, and food crises have hit the region repeatedly. Many young men migrate seasonally to Nigeria or coastal West Africa, and the currency swings of the naira and banditry across the border affect every household budget.

The region eats Hausa food. Tuwo, a stiff porridge of millet or sorghum, is served with miyan kuka, a sauce of dried baobab leaves, or with okra or sorrel sauces; fura, balls of millet flour, are mixed with sour milk to make fura da nono, the drink-meal of the hot season. Dan wake are small dumplings of bean flour, served with oil, pepper and onion.

Groundnuts run through the cooking: in sauces, roasted as a snack, and as kuli-kuli, crunchy fried sticks of groundnut paste made after the oil has been pressed out. Galmi onions, a purple-red variety exported across West Africa, flavour most dishes. Kosai bean fritters and masa rice cakes are sold in the mornings, and tsire, spiced grilled meat on skewers, in the evenings.

Herding families contribute milk, butter and cheese. Drinks include kunu, a thin millet or groundnut drink, bissap from hibiscus, ginger juice and sweet green tea. Mutton is the festive meat, above all at Tabaski, when families slaughter a ram.

Zinder is the region's historic showpiece. In the Birni, the old walled quarter, the sultan's palace stands near the Great Mosque, which collapsed in heavy rain in September 2024, and lanes of banco houses carry moulded and painted facades in geometric and animal patterns; the Zengou quarter, once the caravan town, lies nearby among granite outcrops. The Grand Marché, between the two old quarters, is the commercial centre.

Maradi, about 230 kilometres to the west, is a newer, busier town built on trade, with a large central market, the chief's palace and the craft stalls of its artisans' centre, and Lake Madarounfa to the south. Between the two cities, Tessaoua and the other Hausa market towns of the Sahel — Magaria, Mirriah and Matamèye — come alive on market day with cattle, grain, cloth and pottery.

To the west, Birni-N'Konni is a border town where the Niamey road meets the route into Nigeria, and the road north climbs to Tahoua, a market town beneath the Ader plateau, with the Galmi onion fields near Madaoua and the pastures of the Azawagh beyond.